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Author: Fenella Cannell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388154
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse
Author: Fenella Cannell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822388154
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Get Book Here
Book Description
This collection provides vivid ethnographic explorations of particular, local Christianities as they are experienced by different groups around the world. At the same time, the contributors, all anthropologists, rethink the vexed relationship between anthropology and Christianity. As Fenella Cannell contends in her powerful introduction, Christianity is the critical “repressed” of anthropology. To a great extent, anthropology first defined itself as a rational, empirically based enterprise quite different from theology. The theology it repudiated was, for the most part, Christian. Cannell asserts that anthropological theory carries within it ideas profoundly shaped by this rejection. Because of this, anthropology has been less successful in considering Christianity as an ethnographic object than it has in considering other religions. This collection is designed to advance a more subtle and less self-limiting anthropological study of Christianity. The contributors examine the contours of Christianity among diverse groups: Catholics in India, the Philippines, and Bolivia, and Seventh-Day Adventists in Madagascar; the Swedish branch of Word of Life, a charismatic church based in the United States; and Protestants in Amazonia, Melanesia, and Indonesia. Highlighting the wide variation in what it means to be Christian, the contributors reveal vastly different understandings and valuations of conversion, orthodoxy, Scripture, the inspired word, ritual, gifts, and the concept of heaven. In the process they bring to light how local Christian practices and beliefs are affected by encounters with colonialism and modernity, by the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, and by the proximity of other religions and belief systems. Together the contributors show that it not sufficient for anthropologists to assume that they know in advance what the Christian experience is; each local variation must be encountered on its own terms. Contributors. Cecilia Busby, Fenella Cannell, Simon Coleman, Peter Gow, Olivia Harris, Webb Keane, Eva Keller, David Mosse, Danilyn Rutherford, Christina Toren, Harvey Whitehouse
Author: Fenella Cannell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822336464
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Ethnographies exploring the vastly different ways that Christianity is experienced and understood by different groups around the world.
Author: Fenella Cannell
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
Ethnographies exploring the vastly different ways that Christianity is experienced and understood by different groups around the world.
Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857457098
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Too often, anthropological accounts of ritual leave readers with the impression that everything goes smoothly, that rituals are "meaningful events." But what happens when rituals fail, or when they seem "meaningless"? Drawing on research in the anthropology of Christianity from around the globe, the authors in this volume suggest that in order to analyze meaning productively, we need to consider its limits. This collection is a welcome new addition to the anthropology of religion, offering fresh debates on a classic topic and drawing attention to meaning in a way that other volumes have for key terms like "culture" and "fieldwork.
Author: Timothy Larsen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191632058
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Throughout its entire history, the discipline of anthropology has been perceived as undermining, or even discrediting, Christian faith. Many of its most prominent theorists have been agnostics who assumed that ethnographic findings and theories had exposed religious beliefs to be untenable. E. B. Tylor, the founder of the discipline in Britain, lost his faith through studying anthropology. James Frazer saw the material that he presented in his highly influential work, The Golden Bough, as demonstrating that Christian thought was based on the erroneous thought patterns of 'savages.' On the other hand, some of the most eminent anthropologists have been Christians, including E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Edith Turner. Moreover, they openly presented articulate reasons for how their religious convictions cohered with their professional work. Despite being a major site of friction between faith and modern thought, the relationship between anthropology and Christianity has never before been the subject of a book-length study. In this groundbreaking work, Timothy Larsen examines the point where doubt and faith collide with anthropological theory and evidence.
Author: Brian M. Howell
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493418068
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
What is the role of culture in human experience? This concise yet solid introduction to cultural anthropology helps readers explore and understand this crucial issue from a Christian perspective. Now revised and updated throughout, this new edition of a successful textbook covers standard cultural anthropology topics with special attention given to cultural relativism, evolution, and missions. It also includes a new chapter on medical anthropology. Plentiful figures, photos, and sidebars are sprinkled throughout the text, and updated ancillary support materials and teaching aids are available through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources.
Author: Matthew Engelke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520940040
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
The Friday Masowe apostolics of Zimbabwe refer to themselves as "the Christians who don’t read the Bible." They claim they do not need the Bible because they receive the Word of God "live and direct" from the Holy Spirit. In this insightful and sensitive historical ethnography, Matthew Engelke documents how this rejection of scripture speaks to longstanding concerns within Christianity over mediation and authority. The Bible, of course, has been a key medium through which Christians have recognized God’s presence. But the apostolics perceive scripture as an unnecessary, even dangerous, mediator. For them, the materiality of the Bible marks a distance from the divine and prohibits the realization of a live and direct faith. Situating the Masowe case within a broad comparative framework, Engelke shows how their rejection of textual authority poses a problem of presence—which is to say, how the religious subject defines, and claims to construct, a relationship with the spiritual world through the semiotic potentials of language, actions, and objects. Written in a lively and accessible style, A Problem of Presence makes important contributions to the anthropology of Christianity, the history of religions in Africa, semiotics, and material culture studies.
Author: Webb Keane
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520939212
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane's analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.
Author: Chris Hann
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520260562
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
"This collection of essays is a welcome and refreshing gift in a virtual desert. There has been very little comparative anthropological research on the Eastern churches, and this volume will fill that gap."—Michael Herzfeld, author of Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome "At long last there is a book on the anthropology of Christianity that devotes direct and sustained attention to the diverse Eastern Christian Churches—both Orthodox and Catholic. This book should be read by anyone who thinks anthropologically about Christianity. Scales will fall from their eyes and they will behold an entire wing of Christianity that has, until now, gone mostly unnoticed and practically untheorized."—Douglas Rogers, author of The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals
Author: Pamela E. Klassen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520244281
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
“Klassen’s book is much more than a first-rate study of how two churches in Canada positioned themselves within the ostensibly parallel worlds of biomedicine and spiritual healing. It is, at its core, an insightful meditation on the relationship between liberal Protestantism and the project of modernity. A must read not only for students of Christianity, but all those interested in the legacies of secularism and enchantment." —Matthew Engelke, London School of Economics
